Random traffic dropping is a large problem in today's communication networks. As a result of random traffic dropping, traffic may just disappear during the transmission without any alarms being triggered. For example, a physical link between two routers may experience a random traffic drop of 0.3 percent, meaning that, on average, three packets out of every 1,000 packets sent simply disappear. Since many of today's applications (e.g., electronic trading applications) demand ultra high service delivery ratios (e.g., in the range of 99.99% to 99.999%), random dropping can cause problems for these ultra high service delivery ratio communication applications. Since the nature of this problem is random, and because the global network is very large and complicated, it can be extremely difficult to detect and trouble-shoot the occurrence of random traffic dropping.
Random traffic dropping can occur due to many causes. The most common causes are transport medium degradation with respect to time, such as fiber optics and electronic equipment degradation. Severe operating conditions, such as high or low temperature and humidity and/or unstable electrical input, can also cause random traffic dropping. Random traffic dropping may also disappear and reappear randomly, making trouble shooting that much more difficult.